How to Balance an Unusually Shaped Item

A viewer, Darinda, asked, “How do you balance a sculpture?”

If you have an oddball shape and want to stand it up on one point, how do you get it to balance? Kevin has been working on a big monster rock sculpture titled Opuntia petra (https://kevincaron.com/art/opuntia_petra/). that has required him to do a lot of balancing.

Kevin shows an odd-shaped rock and explains that the way to do it is to use a choker. He shows a piece of cable with swedges and clamps on each end to create loops. Put one looped end through the loop on the other end and now you have a choker. Now just wrap the oddball shape in the choker. Once you hang it, you can figure out where bottom is.

If you don’t like it quite like that, it’s easy enough to slide the choker a bit and rotate the item. Now it’s hanging the way you want it. You can do this in any direction. You can get it to hang pretty much any way you want it, as long as you get a straight line around it with your choker. You have to move the bottom of the cable as well as the upper part to get it straight.

What if you have a big item? Kevin shows a thinner cable with loops on each end that he uses to come from a different angle. Now you can pick it up from two different directions to get it to hang just the way you want it.

Once you locate the bottom of the piece, that’s where you mount your post for your bearing or your pedestal.

You can get cable down at Home Depot or another hardware store, and probably the clamps and swedges, too. A piece of garden hose can cover the cable to protect your work.

Now just hang it from a rope over a tree limb, or use a come-along to hook it to a beam overhead, or something similar. Now you’re in business. Kevin Caron thanks Darinda for hanging around to wait for this video and hope it points some others in the right direction, too.

Before you go, see Kevin admit that tripping over his own tongue is quite a feat ….